When you’re brainstorming on your laptop and plain text just won’t cut it to express your ideas, you might need an extra workspace you can actually draw on. Why not add a quick, erasable surface to your laptop for an added level of expression?

Putting limits on your brainstorming may seem counterproductive, but it actually helps you get your ideas flowing. The Japanese game of shiritori is an easy way to guide your brainstorming session, whether you’re looking for ideas for a new project, book, or physical product.

In 2010, Thomas Thwaites decided he wanted to build a toaster from scratch. He walked into a shop, purchased the cheapest toaster he could find, and promptly went home and broke it down piece by piece.

Nearly all great ideas follow a similar creative process and this articles explains how this process works. Understanding this is important because creative thinking is one of the most useful skills you can possess. Nearly every problem you face in work and in life can benefit from creative solutions, lateral…

The first step (always the hardest, right?) in solving a problem is recognizing you have one. We’re all familiar with the feeling of grappling with a head-scratcher for longer than we’d like. It can take a while to connect the time we’ve lost staring at the screen with the fact that we’re stuck on something and it’s…

Whether you’re coming up with a side business or trying to figure out what kind of website to launch, chances are, you have ideas bouncing around your head all the time. To organize and work through your brainstorm, break it up into a three-step process.

When you’re brainstorming, you often want to just let ideas come out however they decide to do so. That usually doesn’t get you very far though. 99U points out it’s often best to come up with some type of constraint or random goal.

Your first idea probably isn’t your best one. However, many of us suffer from “design fixation”, where we become married to our first idea because we had it first. Avoid this problem by forcing yourself to come up with multiple solutions.

The moment a great idea or solution hits you can feel like magic—like it’s been delivered whole to you by some divine being. But what usually ends up happening is quite the opposite—we’re floundering and stuck on a problem, desperate for one of those magic breakthroughs to pull through.

As the saying goes, if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem will look like a nail. The same logic applies when you're approaching more abstract problems. A "mental model" is a way of looking at the world, and sometimes you need to expand your perspective beyond your usual mental toolbox by learning…

You have a brilliant idea for a book/business/project and you just know it's gonna take the world by storm. You can't see the flaws in your plan until you start writing your ideas down, so start writing.

It can be exciting when you have a eureka moment. However, rather than spilling the beans on your ideas quickly, you may be better off writing them down and giving them some more time to quietly develop in your mind to mature and complete themselves.

While persistence is a great virtue, some types of problems call for solutions that simply can't be developed through grinding. If you find yourself stuck on a problem or creative challenge, switch tasks after 15 minutes to take your conscious mind off it.

The longer you brainstorm ideas, the more entrenched and defensive people can become with them. By cutting your brainstorm session time in half, you can get the good ideas out faster and save your team from wasted time.

It's easy to get lost in the weeds at work. While being heads down has its place, it's equally critical to look up: to reflect on how things are going, to consider alternative strategies, and to ask yourself the hard, high-level questions. How can you take a step back and look at the big picture?